For some reason the festival had an extra day this year and started on Thursday already. Not the most convenient thing - but what can you do? There was also a fair share of bad weather announced which made me pack the rubber boots along with all sorts of other junk to take on the camp site where we stayed in our traditional favourite spot and managed to put up the tent before any rain happened.
The rain would come later but - unlike in other years it was reasonably moderate in both its intensity and duration. Which - along with everybody being well equipped with boots and raincoats as well as the critical parts of the festival grounds having been covered with plastic tiles - meant that luckily the bad weather wasn’t all that critical and didn’t affect things too much.
Finn and Norman Palm
Starting things off in the pretty Spiegelzelt were finn (who apparently stepped in for Noah and the Whale on short notice). We just saw the very end of their gig, so I can’t really say much. Afterwards Norman Palm played. Not too exciting, but doing well for a guy with his guitar.
We skipped a few lessons then and went back to the tent to get to know the neighbours as well as eat a little. As usual that dragged on a little but we made it in time to see the two remaining gigs on the main stage.
Foals
Foals reminded me of the Bravery in their sound. The same kind of poppy blandness and perhaps a bit less cheesy. All right to watch but not exactly my cup of tea.
The Flaming Lips
To top off the first night, what may be considered the festival’s highlight happened. Certainly The Flaming Lips playing there would have been reason enough to visit in its own. Particularly for those of us who loved their music for ages and hadn’t seen one of their not particularly frequent gigs before. I was really looking forward to that.
Even before they started playing the band left an impression. They seemed to bring along their own staff for the equipment which did their work in bright orange street construction workers’ overalls and in addition to that the band members actually took part in setting up and checking the equipment brought up on stage. The band also seemed to be responsible for bringing along giant disco mirror balls to decorate the stage, a screen to put behind it and a bunch of people dressed as Teletubbies to decorate the sides of the stage in silliness.
The gig started with what seems to be the typical move of Wayne Coyne being in a huge transparent rubber ball and rolling on top of the audience a little as a warm-up. Additional confetti and balloons were added later (as well as over and over again throughout the gig) which made the whole thing look fantastic and photogenic.
However, my impression was that the sound wasn’t very good with the vocals being too quiet and a lot of the magic in the songs which is familiar from the albums not making it across to us from the stage. While that improved a little through their gig, I kept having the impression that the band never quite ‘connected’ with the audience. - Which in the end left us with a nice performance but not one restoring a sense of childlike wonder or being quite as life changing as people usually say Flaming Lips gigs are.
And that was that. The festival’s first day passed in what seemed no time at all.
More on Haldern Pop 2008: Friday, Saturday, Sum Up. All Haldern Pop posts.
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They played a great and exhausting gig, rocking the stage with their Anarcho-Swing-Punk (err, whatever) more than listening to their records would have you suspect. The show was great, ‘Addicted to bad ideas’ is a song that just had to be made and when writing happiness, don’t forget to circle the A!
Afterwards – while burger induced overeating inertia still ruled – we made our way down the road to a gig where first S.O.L., three girls from Bremen, played or rather rocked the stage and then Bernadette La Hengst, a queen of the Hamburger Schule, played an extensive set. She has pretty much everything in her songs, a solid performance, a message to communicate, witty lyrics. It’s a good thing altogether. While I appreciate that I’m strangely not a huge fan of her music anyway and find it a bit boring at times.
Freiheit ohne Sicherheit
I enjoyed some of Peter Licht’s songs before. Sonnendeck was a rather popular song some years back and a friend of mine used to have it on his answering machine, which always made me smile. (Wenn ich nicht hier bin, bin ich auf’m Sonnendeck, oder im Solarium, oder am Radar. … Wenn ich nicht hier bin, bin ich auf’m Sonnendeck, oder im Aquarium. … Und alles, was ist, dauert drei Sekunden: eine Sekunde für voher, eine für nachher, eine für mittendrin; für da, wo der Gletscher kalbt, wo die Sekunden ins blaue Meer fliegen.
– roughly If I’m not here I’m on the sun, or in the solarium, or at the radar. … If I’m not here, I’m on the sun deck or at the aquarium. … And everything that is lasts three seconds: one second for before, one for afterwards, one for right in the middle; for where the glacier calves, where the seconds fly into the blue sea.
) And I particularly like Safarinachmittag which my inner antilope always liked (Und wir führten Gespräche über unsre Fragen, welche Tiere wir gerne wären, wenn wir mal wieder Tiere wär’n. Ich wünschte mich als Savannenbewohner; Du wünschtest Dich als Paarhufer oder -sohler; Wir einigten uns auf Termiten, für die wir uns dann hielten.
– roughly And we chatted about the questions we had, which animals we’d like to be, when we were going to be animals again. I wished to be a savannah-dweller; You wished to be an even-toed or even-soled ungulate…
)
As this may have illustrated, this is more about the lyrics than good old rock music – hence there being a reading at the same time. It’s partially silly, it’s about enjoying odd words and the combinations you can form of them. There’s also a hint of politics or social critique to it, although that’s a bit weak as the the music and texts seem to be firmly situated in post-ironic arbitrariness. And thus it was funny, it was well presented and it was entertaining but it wasn’t earth-shattering.
At times the post-irony also confuses me. A song called Wir sind jung und wir machen uns Sorgen über unsere Chancen auf dem Arbeitsmarkt
(We are young and we worry about our job-market opportunities) doesn’t just compete for one of the longest song titles, the song also makes you wonder ‘huh, really?’. And not just because the young doesn’t exactly hold anymore.
I particularly liked the fact that the music was played with real instruments and people on stage while it seems a bit feeble and coming out of electronic toys on the studio recordings.
An enjoyable evening.
P.S. When discussing the gig afterwards, I thought one could describe the music as ‘not as tacky as Andreas Dorau and not as solid as Funny van Dannen’. In my own objective way I’d consider that as correct and unoffensive.
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After that – the evening's main attraction, actually – Plemo played. And they were quite horrible. Not only do I have little respect for people who stand on stage making 'music' by pressing buttons on little gadgets and computers, I have even less for those who lack the Kraftwerk-style dignity of calmy standing around and pretend that what they do is physically exciting. Plemo did just that and out came a sound which I'd describe as 'Dorfdisko'.
After we had such a great start for the evening, this unfortunately spoiled things.
Nice work with text and Gill Sans on the poster I thought. (Even though it's Helvetica and Monotype Garamond on the CD cover).
Gee, I kept thinking the tall guitarist at the right would his head on the low ceiling.
If your musical taste is old-fashioned as well or you enjoyed music like The Greenhornes’, you may want to give this a try.
]]>The two guys ‘complemented’ each other, with one of them playing acoustic guitar and singing while the other played keyboardy things as well as violin and electric guitar. At times their songs seemed overly simple and I wasn’t too impressed then. Generally I liked the keyboardy-violiny bits better.
Along with the music they ran some video projections which were unfortunately crippled a bit by the shape of the room which made quite a bit of the image appear distorted on the low ceiling and walls. Parts of it – particularly in the second half – were quite cool. Hooray for video.
Katrine Ottosen played first and it was literally just her and a bunch of keyboards on stage. She used one or two of them at a time and sang along. In the beginning the music seemed a bit feeble and the singer a bit nervous but that improved and some beautiful moments came along later on. Yet, – despite being a definite non-fan of overdone production – I kept thinking that perhaps having a bit of bass or percussion along would make the music more powerful.
Katrine kept making a bit of a joke of her upcoming but not yet completely recorded EP and I wonder whether we’ll perhaps see some of those extra instruments in there when she can record more tracks together. In fact, there was even a copy of the EP to win for recognising a cover version of a song she player. Unfortunately it was a Britney Spears song so I didn’t have a chance… and it wasn’t as good as her own songs anyway. Her own songs were more in the style of Feist, for example, whose CD they played before the gig started. Might be interesting to keep an eye on what she does in the future.
Lena Malmborg then came on after a short break. She came with a band and played music which sounded somewhat American / countryish. Too American / countryish for me to like it anyway. The fact that – unlike the rest of her band – Lena didn’t really seem to enjoy singing and brought all the flair of a businesswoman to the stage probably didn’t help either.
Shortly after the gig they played a version of Arcade Fire’s Ocean of Noise which I didn’t recognise. I thought it could be by a band like Calexico and a trip to Google revealed that such a version indeed exists (as does Norah Jones cover version). But it doesn’t sound like what I heard back there. So I still wonder what they played or whether the time of day and drinks just distorted things a little.
]]>Not just playing, but playing at Rosi’s club (with distinct mixing of a German name and English punctuation, cough) a few minutes down the road that my friend highly approved of, and rightly so. The added bonus of things just starting around midnight even meant we had plenty of time for some chili before leaving.
And thus, instead of going to play ping pong as we enjoyed on my previous visits, we went to see a band sing Just a Song about Ping Pong and many other songs in a great gig. The band looked young, or rather really young (with the exception of their drummer who looked really really young) which probably gave them that extra bit of enthusiasm. Fun, energetic, violin laden, well-sung. [Add Beth Gibbons comparison here.] Great fun.
And one of my favourite singers attended as well.
]]>After getting to Stansted and on the coach to London (which was the easyBus one, that arrived close to our hotel but which I wouldn’t really recommend as their bus is more a minibus and not particularly comfortable) and checking into the hotel, we were off to see Prom 71 at Royal Albert Hall.
I’ve only been to two Proms concerts before (incidentally seeing Beethoven’s fifth piano concerto both times). The first time was ten or so years ago and we got fancy seats with my parents. I wasn’t too impressed by that as I thought the music was rather quiet, distant, and hardly more interesting on CD. The other time, I went there with Dave a few years back and we did the proper queueing and standing thing with a place quite far at the front. Which was excellent.
And thus, this time we were in for queueing as well. And as I couldn’t really find out when to start queueing to be sure we would get in and have a good place, we arrived there rather early, being among the first hundred people to queue. And it’s just wonderful how well organised and friendly the queueing is, just as legends about the UK will tell you. Not only was the queue very relaxed with people sitting on the steps behind Royal Albert Hall in with comfortable distances between them, but they managed to be friendly and politely queueing at the same time.
At some stage we even got little paper tickets with a number for our place in the queue, so we could temporarily leave to get some snacks. When doing that I had to venture through the neighbouring streets which seem to suffer from inhabitants with far too much money and the urge to sponsor the German automobile industry. According to the people we spoke to, a couple of whom had been to every single Proms concert that week, it had been a very exciting week with many famous orchestras coming by.
And while not quite being the Vienna Philharmonics, seing the Boston Symphony Orchestra with James Levine was rather good as well. They first played a UK premiere the short Three Illusions Elliot Carter who is almost a hundred years old but composes very ‘modern’ music. This bit of modernness isn’t really my cup of tea I think. While there were a number of ‘new’ sounds in the piece which really set it apart from ‘classical’ pieces, I thought that in total it sounded a bit too engineered or mechanical to be nice. Without doubt it’s clever and perhaps I might start liking it when listening to it repeatedly (after all, that worked for Schoenberg as well), but it’s not my type of music for the time being.
Quite amazingly, as a guy we chatted to told us, Elliot Carter is old enough to have been around when some of Bartók’s pieces were premiered many decades ago which takes us to the second piece that night, Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra (the one which I simply couldn’t buy at the iTMS earlier on – I might add some further bitching about hat later). That was better. Although I had the impression that the conductor wasn’t just in rather bad shape (overweight, needing a chair to lean on and seeming easily exhausted) but also didn’t do too much that could be seen from behind him. The orchestra still managed to play things all right, though.
After the interval, the concert continued with Brahms’ (amusingly many composer names start with B, dont’t they?) first symphony which not only is quite a good piece but also gave us more of the conductor action to be seen which I didn’t see in the first half. And, obviously it’s just great to stand fairly close to the stage when you have some violin solos being played.
While I didn’t find a review of that concert in the Sunday paper, the audience seemed enthusiastic and we got some encores as well with the conductor going off and back on stage and shaking his first violinist’s hand many many times before. [Guardian, random Google result, I hoped I could find a review in the Sun, just for kicks, but apparently the cultural coverage begins at TV and ends with film.)
While standing there, in the middle, fairly far to the front we were also told how the regular Prommers with the season tickets can be fairly territorial about ‘their’ places. In fact, there was an orange plastic bag on the ground just next to our place and several people pointed out to us that this place was taken (looks like British classics enthusiasts are copying German beach chair occupation strategies there, ha!). Apparently taken by a guy who attends every single cocert. Which is cool. Or which would have been cool if he hadn’t smelled like he and his clothes hadn’t been washed since the beginning of the Proms season…
After the concert we had another mediocre meal (not that I’d expect much else in the UK) and a somewhat silly trip back to the hotel consisting of two single-stop tube rides (needlessly, I might add, just that it would have required looking at a real city map rather than just the tube plan to figure that out).
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